How to Record Exact Frame Rate, or FPS (Frames Per Second), for Android Games

On our YouTube channel, we review a lot of new Android devices and two of the feature reviews we do on any new smartphone are the Gaming and Camera reviews. While showing the camera performance to the viewers is fairly easy, I face a few issues with the gaming review. Few devices had some mild lags which were difficult to capture through the lens. So to make things right, I started searching for a tool using which can calculate exact FPS (Frames Per Second) for a game to measure its performance and have some data for our viewers.

However, to my surprise, there aren’t many apps available on the Play Store using which you can calculate the exact FPS for an Android game. There were just a few that were close to what I was looking for and out of which only one managed to deliver. So today, I will talk about the app and show you how you can use it to calculate the FPS performance of any game on your Android, just in case you ever feel like checking out your phone’s performance.

Note: To be crystal clear, in this post, we will be talking about individual FPS for an individual game and not cumulative benchmark scores that are calculated by apps like AnTuTu and 3DBench.

Record FPS of Android Games

Step 1:Download and install GameBench on your Android on which you wish to record the FPS. The apps are free to install and you don’t need root access for the app to work. However, for the first time when the app runs, some ADB permissions needs to be granted which we will see in the next step. Before that, you will have to grant usage access to the app.

Step 2: Turn on Developer Options on your phone by tapping on Software Version in the settings menu’s About page. Then in the Settings menu, turn on USB Debugging from Developers Options and connect the phone to the computer.

Step 3: On your computer now, open GameBench website to download PC setup. The application requires Java, which can be downloaded for Windows using this link. For other platforms such as Mac OS X or Linux, click here.

Step 4: Now, simply run the application on Android and then on the computer and wait for it to execute ADB commands. You may receive a pop-up on your device asking you to allow USB Debugging. If you don’t want to install JAVA and the app, you can also execute the following ADB command manually to grant the permission to the app.

adb shell /data/local/temp/gbhelperdaemon &

Be Warned: You will have to do this step every time the phone reboots.

Step 5: Now unplug the phone from the computer and add the games to the GameBench – Dashboard. You will have to tap on the plus icon and then add the few games that you need to test. The games will be added to the testing dashboard and there will be a play button next to it.

Now all you need to do is launch the game from GameBench for which you need to test the FPS and battery performance for, and play it for a while. GameBench will start recording the performance in the background and as soon as you exit the app, the data will be collected.

As soon as you finish playing the game, you can tap on the graph to know the performance (FPS) and battery usage of the game. You can also check the CPU, RAM and GPU resources used. If you tap on FPS, you can look at the Frame Rate throughout the game as well as the average readings. The graph for CPU and GPU usage is also there in the next tab and almost all the readings you need for a game performance on a device are present and accounted for.

In the Extended Features, you can also choose to get real-time Frame Rate while playing the game. Some feature restriction along with time limit is imposed on a free account which you can remove by buying the pro version from the official website.

Conclusion

So that was how you can track the performance of Android game on your device with FPS, CPU, and GPU usage. You also get the battery performance readings, but in my opinion, the data was not consistent to make a decision. Everything else was spot on. So try out the app and let me know your thoughts about it.